Is the U.S.-Israel love affair on the rocks?

Steve Kowit

Benjamin Netanyahu’s controversial speech before Congress went relatively well. The Israeli prime minister was conciliatory toward President Obama and spoke again and again of his gratitude for America’s support, at the same time insisting that the deal Obama is negotiating with Iran is a very dangerous one.

He received numerous standing ovations. And, of course, those members of Congress who boycotted the speech did not do so because of any animus toward Israel.

Nonetheless, however steadfast Congress might be in its support for that country, a significant number of Americans are going through a decided change of heart.

The boycott, divest and sanctions movement to discourage corporations from investing in business enterprises in the Palestinian occupied territories has been embraced by prestigious academic organizations, by established church groups and by a growing number of university student bodies.

Across the country, organizations that advocate for Palestinian rights such as Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace have been growing rapidly.

Because the issue of Palestinian rights is rarely, if ever, mentioned by the White House or debated by Congress and is generally given short shrift even by liberal sectors of the media, human rights and social justice advocates often find other methods of broadcasting their concerns.

One example is the current mobile billboard campaign hosted by the San Diego chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace in conjunction with The Palestine Advocacy Project, a group formerly known as Ads Against Apartheid:

For the next three weeks a truck will be wending its way through various San Diego communities, exhibiting three eyebrow-raising billboards.

One billboard announces that “Israel has destroyed 27,000 Palestinian homes and created thousands of homeless families.” A second billboard announces that “Israel has built over 150 settlements on land stolen from Palestine.” And the third declares: “Since September, 2000, Israel’s military has killed one Palestinian child every three days, using U.S. tax dollars.”

Despite our government’s continued love affair with Israel, the American people — and clearly many members of the Jewish community among them — are becoming increasingly aware of the brutality of that country’s occupation, its continuing theft of land in the West Bank for the construction of illegal Jewish settlements, its blockade of the Gaza Strip and the mistreatment of the Palestinian population imprisoned there — a fact chillingly underscored by the remorseless destruction of civilian lives and property in Gaza this past summer.

And, of course, many Americans saw the irony of Netanyahu urging our government to insure that Iran be kept from developing nuclear weapons when Israel itself has a large stockpile of such weapons — an illegal arsenal outside the purview of the International Atomic Energy Agency, a fact well understood throughout the world but which neither Israel nor the United States will publicly admit.

People committed to social justice are not pleased that Israel has refused for almost 70 years to permit the victims of the 1948 expulsions the right of return to their homes or to the region where their homes had stood — a right guaranteed by international law.

By now even Israeli school textbooks have been forced to admit that a great many of those people were, indeed, deliberately expelled.

In 1978, the American Zionist leader Nahum Goldmann noted in his book “The Jewish Paradox” a remark that his good friend David Ben-Gurion had made to him in 1956: “They only see one thing: We have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that? They may perhaps forget in one or two generations’ time, but for the moment there is no chance.”

That slow-moving truck making its way around San Diego is part of this quiet shift in political awareness.

A nation that was once spoken of reverently as “the only democracy in the Middle East” might still be a favorite of our members of Congress, many of whom depend on the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee for significant campaign funding, but Israel is rapidly losing friends among ordinary American citizens who take seriously such matters as the demand under international law that people who have suffered expulsion or been forced to flee for their lives be permitted to return to the land that is rightfully theirs.